You Really Can’t Eat Just One, and Here’s the Reason

‘Salt Sugar Fat’ by Michael Moss

Americans eat 33 pounds of cheese and cheese products per year, per person, which is triple the consumption rate of the 1970s. Fans of Humboldt Fog and Cabot Clothbound Cheddar may hope this signals the return of the artisan producer, but Michael Moss gives all credit to mighty Kraft and the other food giants.

“In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an ingredient,” Mr. Moss writes. Thus we have cheese-injected pizza crusts and cheese-draped frozen entrees, cheesy chips and cheezy crackers. Cheese and its processed derivatives were deployed across a gazillion new products and line extensions during decades when Americans, as a fat-avoidance tactic, were actually cutting their milk consumption by 75 percent. From a fat-consumption point of view, he says, “trading cheese for milk has been a poor bargain indeed.”

And that is the nub of Mr. Moss’s case: By concentrating fat, salt and sugar in products formulated for maximum “bliss,” Big Food has spent almost a century distorting the American diet in favor of calorie-dense products whose consumption pattern has been mirrored by the calamitous rise in obesity rates. Entire food categories were invented to support this strategy (Mr. Moss is particularly fascinated by Kraft’s near-billion-dollar line of Lunchables snack trays), as processors bent the American appetite to Wall Street’s will.

Mr. Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who put the phrase “pink slime” into high rotation with a 2009 article on beef safety, deftly lays out the complicated marriage of science and marketing that got us where we are. Is that place a state of addiction? The book uses the language of addiction liberally — soldiers returned from World War II “hooked on Coke,” kids “lunge” for the sugar bowl, a typical salt lover is a “hapless junkie” — and it’s a metaphorical usage that must drive some research purists bananas.

But there is science too. Mr. Moss dives extensively into food-industry and academic research into the brain’s pleasure centers, where sugar and fat sing their siren songs. If not addiction, the love of hyper-processed foods may be what Dr. David A. Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration director, called “conditioned hypereating” in a 2009 book that covered some of the same ground.

Importantly, Mr. Moss reports deeply from inside the food companies: researchers, marketers, strategists, C.E.O.’s and many who have left their work, some with regrets about how good they were at leveraging the bliss point. “Salt Sugar Fat” is not a polemic, nor a raised platform for food purists to fire broadsides at evil empires. This is inside stuff, and the book is all the stronger for it.

Why, then, is the book a bit wearying? Partly it’s because this is not a new story, not surprising to anyone who has contemplated the list of 31 ingredients on a tiny packet of Cheez-It Gripz. Partly it’s because the book moves slowly, in wide eddies, first considering sugar, then fat, then salt, whose functions are nominally different but ultimately the same.

There is plenty here to make one’s blood pressure rise. (Must a child-targeted snack pack contain 830 milligrams of sodium and 39 grams of sugar? Really?) But the finer points of factory-to-table food formulation are not riveting. Nor does Mr. Moss consider that many of the techniques developed by food scientists — fat-globule dispersion, sugar-crystal manipulation — were cherished by Escoffier. Chefs have long played with the chemistry of food, intuitively hunting down the “bliss point” with as much gusto as any chip scientist at Frito-Lay.

Photo

Michael MossCredit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Mr. Moss also strains to dramatize the preoccupations of marketers, describing a “hold your breath” moment when Kraft learned whether customers would lose interest in Lunchables after the company moved from yellow cardboard sleeve to a sleeveless box. One Lunchables team brainstormed the question of “what could a pizza be like that would fit into the Lunchables world?” “The Jungle” this isn’t, nor “Fast Food Nation.”

Still, Mr. Moss meticulously lands his punches. The result is the sinking realization that we’ve eaten like a nation of impulsive teenagers, happy to pay for a diet of carnival food. As one sensory researcher notes, everything on American food shelves that can be sweetened has been sweetened. Our adolescent food culture fell hard for the romance of industrial perfectibility and the “convenience doctrine”: the proposition that easy should define good in American eating.

Today, Mr. Moss says, the food companies have boxed themselves in, blessed and saddled with fattening foods that are “so tasty, people can’t resist eating them.” Healthier formulations of heavily processed food, he insists, simply don’t taste as good. (This may be true of the most highly processed foods, but, based on extensive tasting in my work, it’s not so for a wide range of new foods now flooding the supermarkets from both small companies and the giants.)

Mr. Moss does credit industry efforts to reduce salt, fat and sugar. He gives a lengthy account of debates and initiatives that followed Phillip Morris’s purchase of General Foods and Kraft in the 1980s, which left veterans of the tobacco wars mulling the possibility of lawsuits and legislation associated with obesity. There are, within these companies, people pushing to accelerate the reformulations, and Mr. Moss talks to them.

However, the market punishes those who let margins slip in the name of health — as PepsiCo, for example, has been punished. This is not an optimistic book. The only counsel Mr. Moss offers consumers dribbles in with the last two sentences: “After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.”

By focusing relentlessly on the food giants, Mr. Moss presents them as hegemonic — dominating food supply, defining food culture, producing food that by their own (and their consumers’) definition has been as tasty as food can be. Arguably this was so. Is it so now?

Mr. Moss quotes a few experts who believe a consumer backlash is under way, a generational pulling away from the ersatz. But he barely glances in that direction. Missing is any consideration of the ferment now bubbling away in America’s food culture.

Consider the boom in farmer’s markets, the elevation of the chef, the proliferation of urban food trucks, the return of the artisan, the growth of craft beer at the expense of big corporate brewing, the admittedly high-end but notable success of Whole Foods, even the appearance of oatmeal and better coffee in McDonald’s, not to mention the appearance of healthy grains and nonfat Greek yogurts and myriad global-pantry products on Wal-Mart’s shelves.

Perhaps the teenager shows signs of growing up? If so, not even Wall Street could stop such a tectonic cultural shift. Mr. Moss’s book is a little like a plate of processed cheese: fresh, in its way, but behind the culinary curve.

SALT SUGAR FAT

How the Food Giants Hooked Us

By Michael Moss

446 pages. Random House. $28.

Scott Mowbray is the editor of Cooking Light magazine.

A version of this review appears in print on March 18, 2013, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: You Really Can’t Eat Just One, And Here’s the Reason. Today's Paper|Subscribe